Friday Philosophy – The Best IT Person I Have Met September 24, 2010

I’ve had the pleasure of working with and meeting a lot of talented and capable people in IT – some of them have even been nice people too 🙂 {In fact, most people I have met do not match that annoying myth about IT’s reputation for social awkwardness). However, for me one person sticks out in my mind as the best person I have worked with in IT.

It’s Barry. I’m pretty sure none of you have met Barry, and in fact as I knew Barry back in 1996 I’m not so sure I would recognise him (and I have no hope of remembering his last name) if I met him now.

Barry and I met when I got press-ganged into a Unix system administration team. I was just getting started at being an Oracle Performance person and knew very little about Unix Sys admin. But, for reasons I won’t go into now, I went home on the Friday as an “Oracle expert” and came in on the Monday to find my desk had been physically lifted and moved into the Unix sys admin corral and I was now a “Sys Admin not-expert”. My protestations were listened to – and then ignored, with the information that if I did “not knuckle down and get on with it”, the money would stop flowing. So, rather dazed and just a tad unhappy with the situation, I sat – and sulked – at my desk. And there, sat next to me, was Barry.

You are probably expecting me to now tell you that Barry knew Unix sys admin inside out and how he took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. Well, he didn’t. I have no idea where they got Barry from, I think he was a pro-C developer, but he had just been similarly abused by management and deposited into a team he had not signed up for. And he knew even less about being a sys admin than I did. I at least knew my way around a few monitoring commands like top, w, ps, “glance” etc.

Barry was also not very quick with IT. Don’t get me wrong, he was not stupid, but he was not one of these people who just had an affinity for technology and spent all his spare time building their own media server when CD-ROMS for PCs were still quite new. In fact, he seemed to find the whole of IT to be something of a challenge.

What Barry had though was enthusiasm, commitment and curiosity. Not in an annoying, bouncing all over the place crying “this is great” way, but more a case of “OK, server Falcon has run out of disk space. What can I do about it? How do I find out where the storage has all gone, who is using it and can I get it back off them?”. And he would set to. He’d start with what he knew (which was little more than the “Man” {Online Manual} command in the first week) and the bits he could suck out of my head and work through it. Every few minutes he’d be tapping me on the shoulder and saying things like “Look, you can get information about disk usage here, and map it to the real physical disks by greping for this”.

It was Barry’s attitude that made him stand out, and also his ability to infect you with the same attitude. I started off in that team furious and demoralized, determined to find a new position and resign ASAP. But Barry got over his annoyance and started working. He asked me for advice and discussed the issues over with me, even though I was as clueless as him. When he found something he showed me it. When I found something, he was keen to learn it.

Between us, we got by. We knew very little and it was hard work, but because Barry was not daunted and would keep working on the problem until he had it sorted, he dragged me along with him. Often I would still be there with him into the evening, sorting something out when everyone else had gone home. He did not just take on every problem people came to us with though, he would stick with what he felt was the biggest issue until it was sorted, and he would keep with it, and ask for help, and try what you suggested.

It only lasted a few months as we both escaped to jobs more suited to our skills, but I learnt a few things. One was that a crummy job could be made a lot better just by your attitude and another was that some people (Barry, not me) had a real talent for enthusing people and thus getting things done. And also, that you did not have to be highly intelligent or knowledgeable to do a very good job. That’s lucky for me, then 🙂

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One of my favorite quotes from my Mother(via Goethe, as the source): “Anything you can do, or dream you can, begin it- for initiative has power, magic and genius in it!” It’s surprising how much a little initiative and a good attitude can provide, even if the experience and knowledge is not there to begin with, eh? Great post, Martin! 🙂

Ahh, Goethe – You should meet my friend Piet de Visser, he is fond of quoting Goethe.
“In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister”, which I believe translates to something like “recognising the limits reveals the master”. Piet also likes a quote by Leonardo da Vinci – Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Piet and I agree that complex solutions by very clever people are often the wrong solution…

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